Pointe shoes: how did the ballerina's shoes appear?

We are all used to seeing ballet dancers fluttering at the tips of their pointe shoes. However, few people wondered what the history of the emergence of this elegant shoe. About how the pointe shoes appeared and what the ballerina's shoes are like, and this article will be discussed.

The beginning of ballet shoes

Usually, with the word "pointe" most people imagine tight satin shoes with tight bandages around the ballerina's narrow ribbons. However, it would be logical to assume that these shoes were not always worn by ballerinas.

Naturally, at the very beginning of the birth of the ballet there could be no question of professional pointe shoes. Many know what the ballerina's shoes are called, but where this concept came from is known to a few. The very name of this particular kind of footwear comes from the French word sur les pointes, which means "to dance with your fingertips". And really, originally ballerinas danced exclusively barefoot, becoming on the tops of fingers. However, this method was extremely traumatic, since the foot had a huge load, which led to permanent dislocations, sprains and other injuries to the joints and muscles. So the idea arose to create a special supporting footwear.

First copies

What were the first pointe shoes? The photo of similar copies is below. For the first time this type of footwear was created in the early nineteenth century. Their invention was famous for Italy. As the original pointe shoes used ordinary shoes, in which they put a soft cloth. This approach helped to avoid injury and excessive stress on the foot.

Later, as dance shoes began to wear tight leather sandals, which were fixed on the foot with the help of sewn on belts.

Modern Pointe Shoes

For the first time in the shoes of a ballerina, similar to real pointes, she danced in 1830 with the dancer Maria Taglioni. This granddaughter of hereditary dancers, who was famous for her ancient surname, was on the stage for the first time during the performance called "Zephyr and Flora". Fulfilling the female role assigned to her, Maria barely touched the ground with her tiny silk shoes. This output produced a furor. Not endowed with the nature of a special female beauty, the dancer completely infatuated spectators with her dancing abilities and, most importantly, in a thoughtful manner. She chose exactly those tough shoes with a special seal in the finger area, which subsequently had such success in the ballet world. These were the same pointe. Everyone can see a photo of their owner.

However, no less popular this kind of shoes made and another famous personality - the wife of the commander Napoleon Josephine. She preferred to wear ballet dancing shoes. They were small slippers made of satin fabric, which were attached to the foot with ribbons. In the era of romanticism, such casual and light shoes had a huge demand among women of fashion and secular divas. Among the art critics it is believed that it was these shoes that later became the prototype of the poins known to us.

On the territory of Russia Avdotya Istomina became the first ballerina who started dancing in this footwear . Now the ballet, pointe shoes and dancers acting in them, are inalienable concepts.

Creating Pointe Shoes

Ballet shoes seem extremely simple and easy to manufacture in shoes, but this is not true.

Modern pointe shoes consist of 54 elements. Each pair of such shoes must strictly conform to the dancer's leg, thus avoiding unnecessary injuries and stresses. Shoe selection is also carried out individually.

Each shoe consists of three components. This is the top of the pointe, which consists of several layers of satin and is covered on the inside with a lining cloth, as well as a rigid, unbending outsole made of genuine leather and the place where the fingers are placed. This part has the shape of a box of several tightly glued layers of tissue.
It is the high requirements for the dancing pointes that explain the fact that, despite the high level of automation of production, most of the assembly of these shoes passes by hand. As a rule, the dried, clotted pointes are left on a specially adapted shoe, after which they are processed with tools and stitched with a durable thread soaked in paraffin solution. For hardening, the ballerinas' shoes are left to dry at night from forty to fifty degrees.

All shoes differ in shape, strength, durability and are selected for each dancer individually.